Hi! Quick question from a tech novice.
I used to use two USB flash drives to store my video & photo files, & as you can probably guess, both of them spontaneously died, & I lost everything. I have learned my lesson since then & I am now using two external hard drives for storage. I did read that their life expectancy only last about 3–5 years, so I’m trying to take better care of them so they last as long as they can. For example, I only just learned that I should be safely ejecting them instead of just unplugging them (rookie mistake, I know). Now I want to organize my files better, things like renaming them, adding tags or comments, maybe even rating them with stars (I noticed some files can be rated out of 5 stars), so that I can find some files easier. But I came across a post saying that doing stuff like this to USBs can make them fail faster.
So here’s my question:
Does organizing or editing metadata (like renaming, tagging, or rating files) shorten the lifespan of external hard drives too? If it does, should I do all that organizing on my laptop first & then move the files over? Would copying the files back to laptop, editing them, then copying them back to the external hard drives also decrease the life expectancy as well?
If it helps, I believe (not 100% sure) that both of my hard drives are Spinning drives (HDDs).
Thanks in advance for any advice!